Principal Darryl Wyatt shows an area of overgrown weeds at Bailey Middle School Friday, June 10, 2022.
Sunday, June 19, 2022 | 2 a.m.
Bailey Middle School Principal Darryl Wyatt has $30,000 in his annual budget for landscaping, and here’s what he has to show for it: weeds choking raised plant beds, exposed bubblers marking the spots where shrubs long ago died and were removed but not replaced, unpruned trees and hedges in his courtyard where students gather.
The first thing a visitor sees from the parking lot is a brown swath of skeletal bushes and sharp stumps that Wyatt laments as tripping hazards.
Despite a state decentralization law that reorganizes the power structure to put more decision-making authority in individual Clark County School District schools, landscaping was always centralized. The district recently made an exception for rural schools to hire third-party companies, but under the law, the northeast Las Vegas school must use its $30,000 allocation to “buy” services back from central district landscaping staff — which Wyatt said he hasn’t seen in months.
If he could hire outside vendors, he’d bring in a couple of workers, one day a week.
“They would be answering to me. I would be walking the property with them and we’d be talking about the issues of all the weeds and overgrown plants and dead trees, and it just wouldn’t be acceptable,” he said. “I don’t have that latitude in the current setup.”
The scruffy landscaping adds to what Wyatt said is a persistent lack of compliance with a law that was supposed to peel back bureaucracy and give principals control of fundamentals like staffing, curriculum and equipment, services and supplies.
The Nevada Department of Education says it is willing to put the Clark County School District into receivership for not complying with the sweeping decentralization law, Assembly Bill 469. The district alleges overreach and overstatement on the state’s part, admitting to only being a few, minor steps out of compliance.
Ed Gonzales, who was a staffer with the Nevada Assembly in 2015 when the first reorganization law passed and a lobbyist in 2017 for the Clark County Education Association teachers’ union when a follow-up law passed, said it’s hard to judge how effective the organizational teams, a key feature of the reorganization, have been because the district never acquiesced to their full powers.
He is now part of the Hickey Elementary school organizational team, which brings together staff, parents and community members to advise the principal on campus decisions.
“Nobody, I think, thought the district would outright not follow the law, just be defiant — and then when they get called out for being defiant, act even more defiant,” he said.
In a September progress report to the state superintendent, Nevada Legislature and Gov. Steve Sisolak, the district pushed back on several aspects of decentralization. The report said centralization can lead to greater academic success in large, urban school districts, and said the requirement that 85% of unrestricted district funds be allocated directly to individual schools, with only 15% going toward central services, was arbitrary and infeasible for economies of scale.
Gonzales characterized this report as a list of objections and evidence that the district simply doesn’t want to comply.
Jessica Jones, a kindergarten teacher at Hickey Elementary School who chairs the organizational team, said not following the rules should have consequences.
“The district always says, ‘this law doesn’t work.’ They’ll go and say that to the state board and they’ll say that to legislators. But they’ve never actually implemented the law entirely to be able to accurately say yes, it doesn’t work,” she said. “They haven’t even given it a chance to not work.”
Gonzales said he supports receivership as a last resort.
“I support the language of putting them into receivership but we should never get to that point,” he said. “But if the district doesn’t want to comply with laws that they’re required to follow, what choice do people have?”
If the state makes good on its threat, here are a few ways various stakeholders around CCSD could feel it:
End to forced teacher hiring
More than allowing principals to select the teachers and staff they want for their campuses, the provisions for hiring autonomy mean being able to reject the ones they don’t want. But counter to the law, the district isn’t allowing the latter.
As a former high school principal who now leads the union that represents CCSD’s building-level administrators, Jeff Horn wouldn’t want ineffective and abusive teachers on his campus.
So the Clark County Association of School Administrators and Professional-Technical Employees sued CCSD in 2020 because the district forces schools to accept teachers when shrinking enrollment on their campuses makes them redundant and they need a new place to land.
Reassignment for “surplused” teachers and support staffers is protected in their respective unions’ collective bargaining agreements — covering “ineffective (and sometimes borderline abusive) teachers,” the principals’ union says in court documents.
“Having the ability to select the best possible people for a position is invaluable. It shouldn’t be that difficult,” Horn said. “What’s going on are unions … are just protecting poor-performing employees who aren’t able to get a position when we have hundreds and hundreds of openings. If you can’t get a position (when) there’s hundreds and hundreds of openings, what’s that tell you about that particular employee?”
Given how much authority principals have, on paper, it would seem like a principal’s law. Horn says it’s a student-centric law because a bad teacher can have lifelong effects.
“If it’s really about moving the needle and impacting kids, principals need to be able to hire the best possible individuals to be in front of our kids,” Horn said. “It’s not about protecting adults, it’s about protecting our kids.”
A district court judge sided with CCSD last year. That led the principals to appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court, where the suit is pending.
Anxiety
If the state were to take control at CCSD, school board members and the superintendent would stay in place. They just wouldn’t be in charge of compliance processes for the reorganization law, explained Lisa Guzman, a school board member who sits on the state and district subcommittees for reorganization compliance.
But that assumes the reorganization can be teased apart from other district operations. Guzman argues that it can’t.
Guzman, the assistant executive director of Nevada’s affiliate of the National Education Association, remembers having to assuage teachers’ intimidation and fears of the unknown at a school district under state takeover in Arizona. So when she hears the word “receivership” here, she winces.
“At CCSD, our perception is different than the state board of ed’s perception. We see it as a district takeover,” a full takeover, she said, “whereas the state board of ed just sees it as an AB469 takeover. We don’t see it that way, because AB469 touches everything that we do. They think that it’s like this category, but we see it as the entire district.”
Guzman said she wants CCSD to comply, and principals and the central office want to comply, too. But they want to do it correctly, and the law is confusing, she said.
New security cameras
Jones, the Hickey kindergarten teacher, acknowledges some notches in her school’s win column under proper application of the law, including the school organizational team successfully pitching the district to hire a second assistant principal. It’s a rare position among elementary schools but Hickey leadership said it has become necessary as children struggle with their behavior and emotions post-pandemic.
And in 2019, after some sparring with the state, the district freed up the school’s previously swept “attrition funds,” or the cost savings from using a substitute instead of filling a vacancy with a permanent, full-time teacher. That allowed Hickey to purchase a new English language arts curriculum that Jones said had an immediate positive impact on pupils.
But the eastside school is still fighting for the permission to upgrade its nearly useless security cameras, even though it has the money, she said.
The cameras are so old that even when pointed right at the license plate of a suspected thief who ripped a catalytic converter out of a car in the teacher parking lot, the getaway car’s plate was unreadable, Jones said. There are also blind spots around campus.
Cameras are a key component of campus safety, especially in light of a gripping wave of violence around the district and a commitment by officials to beef up security. But district leaders have said that high schools, then middle schools, take higher priority.
What Hickey needs might not be what its neighbors need. That’s the point of local control.
“It just depends on the school, because every school needs something different,” Jones said.
Teacher training, curriculum
Wyatt says the central office has taken back control of variances that allow students to attend a school out of their home zones and recently, standardized math and science curricula. Last week, Bailey staff attended two days of district-mandated professional development.
If the state forces compliance, these would be his call, he said.
“Too much of the decision making at the top level has been done regardless of either the law or what’s best … and I think the state does need to step in,” he said. “Quite honestly, I wish they could even have a more broad role in taking over.”
Wyatt has worked in CCSD for 30 years, 22 of them as a principal somewhere in the valley.
“I don’t want to sound like I’m angry, but we’ve never had less autonomy in all the years I’ve been a principal as we do right now,” he said.
